“... title of Pater Patriae, even as he undermined the fatherland’s constitution and circumvented its laws; and his precocious grandson Lorenzo, whose charm, sustained by military force, created a legend of enlightened patronage that belied the parlous state of his finances and those of the city he aimed to rule. Still, the imposition of the Medicean dictatorship ...”

“... was spun, and the interplay of developments in London and beyond. In a richly documented vignette David Hayton shows how Irish Tories indulged in Sacheverellism by proxy, championing the cause of their own ‘red-faced, roaring’ militant High Churchman, Francis Higgins. Later they delighted in the fortunes of the Tory lawyer Constantine Phipps, whose ...”

“... and there is even a computer game in which you can play at bashing the British at Canton. Wasn’t David Cameron aware of all this when he arrived in Beijing in November 2010 wearing a Remembrance Day poppy in his buttonhole? Or the right-wing press, when it heaped praise on him for allegedly refusing to remove it when the Chinese asked him? That will have ...”

“... Montagu; and ‘The Motto on Pug’s Collar’, ‘On Sir Isaac Newton’ (‘O’er nature’s laws, God cast the veil of night,/Out blaz’d a Newton’s soul – and all was light’) and even ‘To Mr Pope’ (‘The glow-worm scribblers of a feeble age,/Pale twinklers of an hour, provoke my rage’) for Pope himself. Gerrard follows Howard Weinbrot and ...”

“... ban was extremely helpful to Cumberland. It was found that Asaro had skirted campaign finance laws by collecting cheques from individual Cumberland employees and their family members, then giving them all to D’Amato’s campaign in one go. The donations were technically separate, but it would have been clear to the senator that the money – $76,500 ...”

“... the Birmingham Trojan Horse hoax.)In response to the Tower Hamlets case, the then prime minister, David Cameron, asked his ‘anti-corruption champion’, Eric Pickles, to look into electoral fraud. The subsequent report acknowledged its debt to Mawrey – ‘the judgment of Richard Mawrey QC was one of the reference points for this review,’ Pickles ...”

“... the examples our lawmakers bear in mind when they frame a policy of response in the days to come. David Bromwich New Haven The news from the Middle East is not all bad. The savagery of the attacks on 11 September has, in at least one country, brought Muslim militancy into disrepute and swelled the ranks of the moderates. At the main public prayers in Tehran ...”

“... the same root as ‘rune’ or ‘secret’. The drama of the proceedings zings off the pages of David Carpenter’s magisterial new study. What Carpenter does better than his rivals or predecessors is to make clear the continuing intensity of events after Runnymede and the hectic pace of them. Within days of its sealing, engrossments of the Charter were ...”

“... the evidence of the ‘federalising’ effect. Scotland is clearly drifting away from England, as David Runciman suggested in the last issue of the LRB, making it increasingly hard to speak confidently of ‘British’ politics. But it is not drifting towards independence. On the contrary, the main beneficiary of the drift is Labour, a devolutionist party ...”

“... his anointed successor John Connally, the former Democrat governor of Texas. In Nixon’s Shadow, David Greenberg explores Nixon’s place in modern American culture. While other politicians struggled for name recognition, manifold images of Nixon infiltrated every level of American life from the early 1950s and persisted long after the Watergate scandal ...”

“... been a part of his work; Outcast London began with a survey of British economic thought from David Ricardo to William Stanley Jevons. Now, Stedman Jones’s commitment to the constitutive power of language propelled him down a path that eventually led to a tamed version of social democracy. In An End to Poverty (2004), he sought to recover a lost ...”

“... sample by Hillary Clinton’s Hard Choices, Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century and David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, yet even in this respect Hawking’s book has almost certainly outdone any of Penrose’s brilliant, but bristly and bulky popularisations. (A Brief History of Time is 256 pages long and a documentary about Hawking with the ...”

“... to late-onset philistinism: ‘My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts.’ He eventually found Shakespeare ‘so intolerably dull that it nauseated me’. But the imaginative arts lined up to pay tribute. In Cambridge, Ian McEwan and A.S. Byatt spoke about their ‘literary relationship with ...”

“... anyone can stop us.’ So two hundred of us marched out onto the streets – totally against the laws – and went to the American Consulate and Government House, chanting slogans in favour of Lumumba. Nothing happened – no police, nothing. Our demo was photographed, so we got some coverage; and on the way back to the college, emboldened by what we’d ...”

“... is nothing equivalent to public school for boys – these fine traditions – unwritten laws that turn out so many splendid characters have been withheld from them – to their detriment.’ The most splendid character of all, in her eyes, was Roland Leighton, who had carried off the school’s seven chief prizes (‘most glorious books in the ...”